The category column is kind of odd… it’s sortable, but why? Are you going to browse all topics in alphabetical category order? What is comparing categories in a separate column doing for anyone?
One potential downside for larger screens is that all topics now occupy two lines, instead of sometimes only occupying one (note that tags and assignments already create an additional line anyway)… but we’re also gaining some horizontal space, so it’s also less likely that long titles will have to break to two lines.
Having thought about it a lot, I am hugely in favor of this change.
Another reason is that if you are doing anything at all with tags, or assignment… you’re gonna have 2 line topics anyway, even on desktop.
We should fully embrace that 2-line topics direction, and simplify our default layout by removing the mostly redundant dedicated column for category in the process.
I’ve sorted categories at times when doing cleanup, or when looking at a specific tag. For example, here on Meta I’ll sort the pr-welcome list by category. I’m not against moving the category under the topic title and removing the dedicated column, so long as I can continue to add ?order=category to a URL and have it sort.
This was one of the first changes I made with my theme.
Completely agree with shifting it below topic, it reduces clutter and “sort by category” really makes very little sense even though Josh sometimes uses it … I am definitely not against ninja ?order=tag and ?order=assigned and ?order=category but it is totally in the ninja department.
Certainly helps consolidate things. We made the change early on as well. Makes sense to provide a consistent experience between mobile and desktop. We have many more users on mobile devices these days anyhow.
I think the category under the topic also helps provide context when quickly scanning topics.
Something else to think about: Should we show both the parent and subcategory name now that we’re not confined to a narrow column? At that point we’d be even more consistent with the titles on the topic page…
It’s a bit of a trade-off, this creates more noise on the topic list… but it does make the category/subcategory relationship more apparent.
If you can visually indicate their relationship then absolutely. If there’s no inference of parent/child there’s a risk that it will look like it’s in multiple, or that categories are actually tags.
Have we experimented with the various displays of categories yet with this new design, does the box style still fit nicely and not impede the topic title?
Keep in mind that makes categories look very similar to tags, and I think the distinction between the two is still necessary, but that might be my own bias.
… I am definitely not against ninja 
